Muted Autumn color from an overlook along the Blue Ridge Parkway on Mount Mitchell looking southeast toward Marion, N.C.: Glynn Wilson

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

MOUNT MITCHELL, N.C. — Literary history is filled with stories about motivated people climbing up mountains for inspiration.

Moses supposedly hiked up Mount Sinai and came back with the Ten Commandments. George Mallory told the New York Times in 1923 that he climbed Mount Everest “because it’s there.” There was actually more to it than that. Google it.

Back in 1857, Elisha Mitchell, a geologist, professor at the University of North Carolina and Presbyterian minister, died in a fall trying to prove that Black Dome in the Black Mountain subrange of the Appalachians was the highest peak east of the Mississippi River, higher than Mount Washington in New Hampshire at 6,288 feet above sea level.

His surveys of the mountains in the region turned out to be right, and for that, they named the peak after him. It’s now known as Mount Mitchell and it rises to a peak of 6,684 feet. Mount Washington was downgraded to “the most topographically prominent mountain east of the Mississippi River.”

What is it about mountains that so motivate some of us? Why is there such a competition surrounding them?

Since Homo sapiens first developed the ability to speak thoughts and write them down in just the past 5,000 years, they often thought gods lived in the mountains. They can be ungodly beautiful and sometimes seem to create their own awesome weather systems.

On Saturday when we drove up the winding Blue Ridge Parkway to the top of Mount Mitchell, white, grey and some black cumulus clouds moved swiftly across a cobalt blue sky right at about 6,000 feet — exactly where they are supposed to be according to the science of clouds — cascading over the peak. Nearing the top, the wind whipped the clouds into a lather, creating a menacing, blinding fog on curves with the sun at our face.

It’s not hard to see from here how the power of the weather could motivate primitive people without the tools of modern science to believe a god lived in this place.

It would be hard for people to live here year around. Even the National Park Service and the Mount Mitchell State Park park management closes the roads and the camp grounds up here in winter, like they do in high places all over the country.

Our Primitive Minds

As advanced and developed as we are in this 18th year since the turn of the 21st century and the new millennium, our primitive minds still haunt us. Look at what’s happening in our news and politics.

When Southern Populist George C. Wallace announced that he would not run for another term as governor of Alabama in 1986, he declared he had “climbed his last political mountain.” We don’t seem to have learned that much since in places like the hollows of rural North Carolina, where American flags are flown by Republicans, alongside the Confederate battle flag. Where God and Country means god before country. Everyone’s favorite color is red and they have the Make American Great Again caps to prove it.

Women are talking about pink waves in the Waffle House, but they don’t mean the same thing as the women supporting a Blue Wave on Nov. 6. “Girl Power” has to do with fighting breast cancer.

I admit to growing a tad tired of the #MeToo movement, especially the backlash against it that seems to be working for Trump, and have to agree with a woman writing commentary and reporting facts for the New York Times: We are still treating women in government like unicorns. Think about it.

In only two years since the mind boggling election of the likes of Donald Trump as president of the United States, we have already forgotten how and why it happened, and those who like that it happened are more empowered than ever to keep up the trend going toward a racist sort of nationalism led by an autocratic dictator lover who is fine with killing journalists, a class of people he has consistently written off as an “enemy of the people.”

His fans clearly don’t care.

The old, traditional news press of the 20th century is still acting like people care about a president being involved in a wink and a nod to kill a foreign journalist, one who admittedly published commentary as well as reporting facts. Some people in New York and Washington still cling to the myth that there is no relationship between news and the money that funds it, advertising, and that there is a wall separating news and opinion. It is a myth as surely as climbing mountains gets people closer to god and that the American people want a wall separating church and state. They don’t.

The people who voted for Trump don’t care if Trump and the King of Saudi Arabia killed a journalist. They are celebrating, with their Congressional representatives being re-elected in landslides because they chest bump reporters. Yet the newspapers are still leading the news with story after story about it, hoping to get the public to care about what people in the “news business” care about.

It’s not working.

These same people don’t care that the Trump-Jeff Sessions Justice Department is still separating children from their parents on the southern border of the United States and locking them up in prisons. They want all the immigrants rounded up and kicked out of the country. They will vote for a politician who will do it, or at least say he will do it.

The people who are celebrating the appointment and swearing in of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court don’t want honest, measured, non-partisan justice. They want an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, just like the Old Testament said that they once had read to them by preachers hell bent on tearing down the state and erecting another church in its place.

Never mind what the Ten Commandments and the New Testament say about killing, love and peace. People want a vengeful god who punishes anyone with a different skin color and holds them in slavery for the economic gain of those deemed in the favor of the so-called “one god,” according to the myth they live by.

Science doesn’t matter to them. They didn’t really understand it in the ninth grade when the teacher tried to tell them about Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection. The only lesson they took away from that was “survival of the fittest,” which they took to mean them, the white skinned ones.

There are people who live on islands that are going under water who will still deny the existence of climate change due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels who will vote for a fascist mob boss like Trump with their final breaths as their noses go under the water.

Look No Further Than Tangier Island to Study Delusional Trump Voters

The intellectuals in New York, Washington, Silicon Valley and research university towns all over the country are simply outnumbered by uneducated people with an IQ of average 100 or less who get what little news they pay attention to from talk radio, Fox News and now Brietbart on Facebook.

There are enough Democrats to out vote them, but the liberals, progressives and socialist-democrats or democratic socialists are still spending way too much time arguing with each other on Facebook and making excuses for why they can’t turn out and vote. It’s too hard, millennials say according to recent news stories.

So we will continue to suffer under this fake news regime into the election of 2020 and beyond, while the new Nazi youth are being trained to be the racists of the future by Boy Scout leaders with Confederate battle flag tags on their pickup trucks.

I’m wondering what the mountains are like in Canada, where that country just legalized recreational marijuana use nationwide by federal law. At least there are some countries in the world where the people are smarter than here.

Too bad we can’t stop hating and screaming long enough to learn something from that. We just have to continue believing that we are somehow “exceptional,” all evidence to the contrary.

There are great mountains all over the world. Great people too.

But let’s face it. The idiots out breed the smart people. They don’t believe in birth control. Smart people believe in “family planning.”

Now with Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, they can outlaw abortion and explode the human population to the 9 billion peak projected by scientists.

It will be all downhill for the mountain of human civilization from there for all of our species, people. All colors. Red, yellow, black, brown and white.

Then the end will truly be nigh, but I doubt anyone will be celebrating then, thinking they will be the chosen one’s to escape Armageddon to a moon up in the sky. Of course some will still believe up until the last minute, gasping their last breath of polluted air.

So for now we might as well enjoy it while it lasts. Myself, I have a few more mountains to climb.

More Photos

Muted Autumn color from an overlook along the Blue Ridge Parkway on Mount Mitchell looking west toward Tennessee: Glynn Wilson

A pop up visitor center along the Blue Ridge Parkway, the most visited of National Park Service sites in the country with more than 16 million visitors each year: Glynn Wilson